Make no bones about it, leaving her unpaid post as David Cameron's family champion will wound the A4e boss, Emma Harrison, deeply. It represents a profoundly personal humiliation, and will reflect badly on the company she created and built into a welfare-to-work services giant.

Critics who regard her as a poster girl for privatisation and a symbol of all that was wrong with public services reform will rejoice. The controversy over Harrison and A4e will also be uncomfortable for Cameron, for whom she came to symbolise a fresh approach to dealing with entrenched social problems.

But whether her departure signals anything more significant – about the future of A4e, the work programme, or the increasing marketisation of the state – is open to question.

She had great, innovative plans to get families working again, she told me. Within days her appointment as the government's family champion, tasked with getting "troubled families back on their feet", was made public.

Harrison, the go-getting, no-nonsense entrepreneur and philanthropist with the near-evangelical belief in her ability to "turn people's lives around" crystalised for Cameron his belief that the woes of "problem families" were personal not economic; and that the solution lay not in the agencies of the state but in personal exhortation, and a little life skills training.

Her fall from grace may mean that this most avid of publicity-seekers may have to keep a low profile at the company in which she is a majority shareholder. But does it signal a crisis for A4e? Certainly Harrison gave this hugely powerful company a softer, more homespun, hippy-esque flavour. She likes to talk of A4e as a company driven by "social purpose" motivated by the sole aim of "improving people's lives". Her high profile and plain speaking charm contrasts starkly with the grey-suited anonymity of her supposedly profit-fixated competitors - Serco, G4s, and Ingeus Deloitte.

But the company is locked into scores of potentially lucrative government contracts, already; it will surely win more, and has deep contacts in public services. It is involved in the design of potential new payment by results schemes for ex-offenders with drug addiction issues, and a Ministry of Defence project to get ex-servicemen into work, to name, but two. It has considered setting up an investment arm to attract more private cash into public service privatisation schemes.

With or without Harrison, and notwithstanding the outside possibility that it might not survive a serious work programme cashflow crisis, A4e could well continue to do what it has always done best: successfully exploiting the ever-expanding public services markets that politicians devise.